Kristina Rozhkova

‘Gut Feeling’

by Kristina Rozhkova, published by Void.

Kristina Rozhkova – Gut Feeling Kristina Rozhkova – Gut Feeling
Kristina Rozhkova – Gut Feeling
€50.00

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16,1 x 23,8 cm
128 pages
Hardcover with tip-in image

ISBN 978-618-5479-50-3

Kristina Rozhkova’s book ‘Gut Feeling’ is a visceral confrontation with the systems of control overshadowing artistic and cultural production under Russian authorities.

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Gut Feeling

In June 2024 Kristina Rozhkova was arrested in Russia following a denunciation linked to a photoshoot, placed in a detention centre and later put under house arrest. Developed under conditions of incarceration, her latest book Gut Feeling, responds to a cultural climate of enforced state control, one that stifles dissent and attempts to restrict artistic freedom.

At the centre of the work is the site of the cage, both a literal physical condition and a symbolic social order. Turning to rabbits and rats confined to small cages and spaces, the artist develops a stark visual language to trace a lived experience of incarceration. Placed for two months alongside thirteen women in a pre-trail detention unit, bodies become clashing, hysterical animals held captive.

“I won’t look away from my arrest, and I don’t want others to look away as if it’s something ‘inconvenient’. I will cast a light on this violence, and show – without giving it a comfortable, consumable form – the unpleasant things I experienced myself”

Kristina Rozhkova

For Rozkhova, the cage is also a psychological state. Through making visible the structures of dependency, control and power that infiltrate everyday life – in postindustrial factory farms, within state institutions, and across our most intimate human relationships – ‘Gut Feeling’ becomes a corporeal study of legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence. Images of men and women manipulated, tied up and chained, sit alongside animals muzzled, tethered to milking machines, or slaughtered. The work creates space to reflect on the quiet mechanisms of violence that permeate our everyday existence.

In interrogating animalistic states and conditions of captivity, ‘Gut Feeling’ addresses the ways in which systems of control and dominance can become simultaneous spaces of attachment, desire and lust. Drawing on BDSM dialect and the slave-master relationship, the artist speaks to the transformative potential of the state of confinement, shifting relationships between the hunter and hunted, ruler and ruled. In doing so, Gut Feeling becomes a raw confrontation with realities that are so often avoided.

Gut Feeling

16,8 x 23,8 cm
128 pages
750 copies
Hardcover with tip-in image

ISBN 978-618-5479-50-3

Kristina Rozhkova

Kristina Rozhkova (b. 1996, Perm, Russia) is an artist working primarily with the medium of photography. Her practice explores themes of nostalgia, youth, girlhood, hierarchy, power dynamics, and the complexities of corporeality. She studied Philosophy at Perm University and graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Art and Documentary Photography “Fotografika” in 2022. Her debut project, DACHA, received international recognition, followed by The Bliss of Girlhood, published by ZONE and exhibited in Bristol, Milan, and Tokyo.

Since 2024, her practice has shifted in response to political repression in Russia after the extremist anti-feminist group “Male State” targeted her over a conceptual cemetery photoshoot. This event marked a turning point in her practice, shifting her focus toward the visceral experience of state persecution and the body’s vulnerability under authoritarian pressure. Her work has appeared in publications including i-D, Vice, PhotoVogue, Calvert Journal, and Fisheye Magazine.

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